Free There and Back Again by Sean Astin with Joe Layden Page A

farm where she’d grown up. It was wonderful, practically the perfect moviemaking experience. Every so often, we’d be featured on the cover of the local newspaper, which was kind of quaint and cute, and in the eyes of my in-laws, such local recognition was a unique and important sort of validation. On some level I believed I had arrived at what I was destined to do, which was to carry a movie, to be a movie star. I’d already been the star of The Goonies and Toy Soldiers , and even though I had done a bunch of ensemble films, I wanted to carry a studio picture; I wanted to be … well, I wanted to be Kevin Costner. That’s who I wanted to be.
    I remember going to the premiere of Dances with Wolves in 1991, shaking hands with Costner, and thinking, Wow! He’s accomplishing so much . Costner was still in his thirties, and yet somehow he had the talent, the drive, and the intelligence—not to mention the balls—to put together this incredible project, one that no one initially wanted to support. It was too smart a movie, too ambitious, too political. Worst of all, Costner himself was a first-time director. A neophyte trying to make a historical epic? A western, no less? Everything about the project must have seemed misguided. But there was Kevin Costner at the premiere, smiling proudly, working the room like a pro, confident that he’d not only survived the process, but triumphed. You could just tell: he knew.
    Dances with Wolves made a ton of money and won the Academy Award for best picture, and Kevin Costner became one of the most influential artists in Hollywood. I couldn’t help wondering if that was my destiny, too. Pretentious? Well, it was pretentious for Kevin Costner to think he could make Dances with Wolves . But he did. What really struck me was the fact that he was the director; he was a filmmaker. If it had been Robert DeNiro or Robert Duvall that I’d met at the premiere, I might have felt some distance from them, but this was what I wanted to be: a guy who could carry a movie and make a movie, all at the same time. I looked at Kevin as a likable, accessible film star who also produced and directed a brilliant film. He was the living embodiment of what I wanted to achieve.
    What I lacked was the overt self-confidence that Costner obviously possessed. To a degree, all actors are neurotic and insecure, and how they manage those feelings, how they keep the demons of doubt at bay, goes a long way toward determining their success or failure. I can vividly recall being at the Omni Ambassador in Chicago toward the end of filming Rudy, and having a terrible crisis of confidence: What if this is it? What if this is the best thing I ever do? Christine still loves to tease me about our “pinnacle” conversations. I’ll have a moment of self-doubt, and she’ll just roll her eyes. For this particular pinnacle conversation, there was snow on the ground and we were filming the earlier scenes in the picture, interiors that did not require an autumn landscape and a packed stadium. Because the football scenes had been shot and I was no longer required to look quite as much like an athlete, I had stopped training feverishly and was letting myself slip out of shape again—in part because it fit the character, who begins the film as a factory worker, and in part because I really didn’t feel like working out. There seems to be a direct correlation between my percentage of body fat and how I feel about myself, and as the percentage began to climb, I was gripped somewhat irrationally by a nagging sense of doom.
    What if I just peaked?
    A similar feeling would permeate The Lord of the Rings nearly a decade later. It happens on good movies. The exhilaration and pride in having accomplished something worthwhile are inevitably replaced by feelings of sadness and regret. After all, how can you top The Lord of the Rings? And how could I, as an actor, top Rudy? I had played a